This text-based course is a transcript of the webinar, “Student Entitlement and Faculty Communication with the Millennial Student,” presented by Colleen F. Visconti, PhD, CCC-SLP; Jennifer C. Friberg, Ed.D, CCC-SLP, BRS-CL; and Sarah M. Ginsberg, Ed.D, CCC-SLP.
>> Dr. Colleen Visconti: We are here to discuss student entitlement and faculty communication with millennial students. We have been paid an honorarium for this presentation by SpeechPathology.com. In addition, we have authored the book, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Speech Language Pathology and Audiology, by Plural Publishing. Many of the concepts presented in today’s course are from our book. We do benefit financially from royalty payments from the sale of the book. We have no relevant nonfinancial relationships to disclose.
Learning Outcomes
The learning objectives for today are:
- After this course, participants will be able to described characteristics of millennial generation students.
- After this course, participants will be able to explain the relationship between millennial generation students and teaching and learning issues.
- Participants will also be able to identify key communication strategies to use in teaching millennial generation learners in undergraduate and graduate CSD programs.
Overview
The first thing we would like to know is a little about who is in our audience. Are any of you community supervisors? Are any of you teaching faculty? University or clinical supervisors? We will start off by talking about who are the millennial students and what we know about them as students. Then we will move on to talking about issues that are surrounding entitlement, starting first with what entitlement is and then how we see millennial and entitlement going together. We will move on to talking about teaching and supervising these millennial learners and how to do so effectively. Finally, we will go over guidelines to successful communication for both faculty and clinical educators.
The Millennial Student
The millennial students are the students that have been referred to as the “Nintendo Generation,” the “Me” generation, or Generation Y. Most of the literature when you look at how they define this group of students, they tend to be born sometime between 1982 and 2002. These students are very child-centric, or their society was very child-centric. They were reinforced for participation. These were the children who were on the soccer field and just because they showed up, got a trophy at the end. Or they were in any type of competition, came to class, and got ribbons and stickers for participating. Their self-esteem was very much reinforced throughout their childhood. They also have a great deal of parental involvement. I am sure many of you have heard about “helicopter parents” or have dealt with helicopter parents who are just hovering over them making sure that everything is going the way it should be going or the way that the parent wants it to go. That parenting style also influences the way those students are going to be acting both in our classroom and clinical settings. One thing to caution you is that although we talk about these generalizations, they really are generalizations. There are students that we interact with who do not fit the typical mold of the millennial student.
